Author's Note: From Zootopia co-director Rich Moore: "The story which felt all kinds of crooked at that time...straightened and suddenly the world felt like a world we could relate to, like our world. It didn't feel like a dystopian world."

*Warning*: the key word is "dystopian". This is not a happy chapter, and focuses on Nick's childhood in a Zootopia where tame collars were still around. Skip to the next chapter to avoid water works (mostly).

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Damaged

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Mrs. Wilde sat silent and rigid, holding her kit carefully in her lap. He was shivering uncontrollably in the drafty space. They were only a dozen feet from huge double doors that let frigid air in every time someone entered the building.

They'd been waiting nearly two hours, but her kit resolutely kept his head up, held at a slightly awkward angle, as he strained to lengthen his neck. Adrenaline was doing its job, keeping her young child awake and aware, until safety could be restored.

Only a trained technician could help. When Mrs. Wilde had suggested they should call someone in early, the receptionist had pretended not to hear, so their only recourse had been to sit, and hope.

Mrs. Wilde listened to her kit's breathing slowly grow more shallow, as he fought back against sleep. He breathed through his snout, his mouth clamped carefully closed. His whistling inhales and exhales, typically silent, came twice as fast as usual. He'd cried so much earlier, the lingering congestion made every breathe audible.

The front doors swung open again, letting a shuffling antelope who wore a long blue c...a lab coat! Mrs. Wilde's eyes widened, her ears swiveling to follow the clipping noise his shuffling gait created against the tile floor.

The antelope came to pause at the front desk, and the receptionist, a sheep, raised a relaxed hoof in greeting, then waved it in their direction. "Hey Jeff...got a fox, collar's malfunctioning."

The antelope halfway turned to follow the receptionist's sideways glance, his good mood dieing along the way. His eyes narrowed, lips pulling into a frown. Mrs. Wilde knew the look well. Suspicion - that she and her tiny, seven year old kit were pretending, pulling a trick of some sort, because that's what foxes did, of course.

Mrs. Wilde leaned down slightly, face carefully neutral, ignoring the look, as she had thousands of times before, and gathered her kit up, lifting him in her arms as she stood. He was too big to usually hold this way anymore, and it didn't help that her legs had stiffened from sitting so long on the cold stone bench. She stumbled forward slightly as she rose.

His arms tightened around her, and instinctively he gasped in fear. Mrs. Wilde stood for a long moment, counting her heart beats as her kit's suddenly harsh breathes filled her ears, and she knew he was near tears; could smell the salt. Every strand of fur on her body stood on edge, as the brief panic receded.

The antelope had ambled over, with a look that said he wasn't buying their act. He took a relaxed sip from the cup of coffee he held in one hoof.

Mrs. Wilde spoke as calmly as she could. "Are you the tame collar technician? There's been a malfunction. We've been up all night." She stared up with imploring eyes. "I-it's my son's collar, Nick. He...can't speak. If he does..."

She drifted off, her throat closing tight, mouth shutting into a thin line. His screaming still rang in her ears from hours earlier, the repeated attempts to speak, to explain, ending with her kit writhing on the floor, scratching his own face in trying to get away...

The technician sighed, wearing a slightly putrid look, and glanced briefly toward the double doors he'd just walked through. His eyes lingered on the two police who stood on duty there. He shrugged, took another sip of coffee, and gestured toward the back.

"C'mon, let's have a look."

Once they were in his office, with Nick sitting on an examination table, the technician didn't touch the collar directly. Instead, he took a black flat edged tool out from a nearby drawer. Mrs. Wilde only realized it had a metal tip right as it made contact with the collar, too late to warn.

"N...!"

Nick let out an involuntary scream, as a brief arc jumped from the collar, and the technician hastily pulled it back, yelling out in surprise. "OW!"

Mrs. Wilde was instantly there, gripping her son's arms as the sharp pain made his tiny body writhe briefly. He stared into nothing, desperation focusing him totally on choking down even the slightest whimper. After a moment that felt like a year, he broke into harsh gasps, his body past the initial shock. Nick slowly relaxed, limply leaning against her, his eyes only half open as he took shallow breathes, his entire body trembling from the strain.

"That smarted. Jeeze..." The technician turned away, stepping up to a computer in the corner of the room. Any lingering disbelief had been wiped off his face. "Give me a sec, I'll get it disabled."

The sound of typing filled the room, and 'a second' stretched into minutes, but finally, as if by magic, the tiny green light that indicated Nick's tame collar was active went dim, and a tiny click signaled the release of an internal mechanism.

Jeff came over again, a different tool in hand, and with a few motions, the instrument of her son's torture was finally removed.

"Oh, Nick..." Mrs. Wilde allowed herself to finally hug him fully, as her kit hid his face in her stomach. "Sweetheart...it's over, it's over..."

"Be right back, gotta get a replacement."

Nick froze in her arms. His paws reached up, gripping Mrs. Wilde with desperate strength, the panicked gasping back as her son melted to pieces in her arms.

"Noooo, Mom, No, NO, NOOOO!" The words lost their form, as his emotions overrode the ability to form coherent words, and he was screaming into her chest. It was uncontrolled panic, and as the sound went on, the clipped jog of feet came, and then one of the police officers from the front door was peering into their little tame collar check-in room.

Their eyes locked for an instant; the officer and Mrs. Wilde. He was a zebra, many time's her size. In that instant, her emotions were impossible to hide away, as Nick cried in her arms. The officer's eyes dropped almost immediately, unable to hold her gaze. A hoof came up to his hat as he tipped his head at her briefly in a perfunctory greeting, and disappeared again.

When the technician returned a few minutes later, casually raising the new collar up, Nick panicked again. "Had to dig a little for this..." The antelope pulled up short, as Nick flailed forward, still in Mrs. Wilde's arms, with swiping claws, baring his teeth, growling in a way he never could with a tame collar around his neck.

"Ghhrha-NOO!" Quivering, the ferocity drained from him almost as soon as it had shown itself, and Nick turned back to Mrs. Wilde, blocking out the technician's presence.

"Mom, please..." His huge eyes filled with tears again, and Mrs. Wilde brought up a gentle paw to wipe at his face. He sniffled, blinking, and pushed a cheek into her palm. His voice dropped to a wobble, hardly more than a whisper. "Why? W-what...did I do wrong?"

Mrs. Wilde hugged him close, hiding her own horror. "Nothing. You did nothing wrong Nick...none of this is your fault, never think that..."

As she hugged her child, Mrs. Wilde's eyes jumped up to the technician, who stood waiting. Her eyes narrowed, her muscles tensing, and for a moment, it was there - all the blood-lust the majority of prey animals assumed the predators in their midst always felt.

She tightly closed her eyes, harshly pushing down the fury. A growl would set off her own collar, leaving her shocked and dazed. She gently reached up, caressing her son's neck, massaging fur that was usually almost impossible to clean properly. Sometimes, at night, she just dreamed of being able to get under her own collar. The massage slowly soothed Nick, even though he still sobbed into her chest, eyes closed.

Her son was terrified, and she couldn't stop what had to happen next.

After a few minutes, Mrs. Wilde slowly let her hand drop, knowing better than to push her luck any further. She glanced up into the impatient eyes of the tame collar technician, who silently stepped forward. An instant later, he had the new collar clipped around Nick's neck from behind, and the green light lit up...

Nick jolted up, a look of betrayal in his wide eyes. Then he wilted. Any protest was gone, as the energy drained from him in a hopeless way that belonged to someone decades older, not to a seven year old child. With an empty expression, he curled into himself, a tiny ball of fur on the examination table, as the technician stepped in to test and make sure things were calibrated correctly, tugging the collar slightly this way and that. Nick didn't respond, tuning his presence out.

Tuning her out.

A quarter of an hour later, Mrs Wilde carefully set Nick down in the passenger seat of their undersized, beat up old car, and buckled him in. He'd finally given into fatigue, falling asleep while she had been filling out the paperwork detailing out an explanation for their unscheduled visit to the Tame Predators Initiative administration building. As Mrs. Wilde started up the car, she saw the time, and realized Nick's ordeal had begun nearly twelve hours earlier.

Under the thrum of the car's motor, in the dark of the car garage, the wall Mrs. Wilde had built for herself years back finally fell, and sobs shook her slender frame.

She glanced toward Nick, and her tears made the green glow from his collar shatter into a thousand glittering slivers in the dark, like neon glass.

If Nick had faith in her ability to protect him, that had been shattered, too.

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Author's Note: Was this dark? Why yes, yes it was. But! I did not dream up the concepts in this fanfic...Disney did. If you google "Zootopia's Message Came from Story and Character" you can find the interview with Rich Moore talking about their original concepts for Zootopia.

Anywho. o_O Things jump forward to Judy and Nick in the next chapter.

Thanks for reading, guys! If you can leave a review, that would be *awesome*.